I spent about 90 minutes in my old home last night…the house my former wife and I picked out together when we relocated to the city. She inhabits it now and our two teenagers split their time between “the palace” and my more humble habitat located about four miles away.
Several years ago, while still married, we purchased a bunk bed for my son’s room. Seemed like a great boyhood thing to have. I always wanted one when I was a kid. Bunk beds just spell fun when you’re eight years old and have a sleepover. But when you’re 13, that style of bed loses its luster. So the kid’s mom sold the bed and needed a little help deconstructing the frame.
It’s a rite of passage, I suppose, when a child-like bed is disposed of – enabling that child to grow and mature with more appropriate surroundings. That’s how I felt as I loosened the screws of the bunk bed and hauled it to the garage where the new owners will pick it up in a day or two. For the past seven years, that bed enveloped my son each night. Formative years. He’s dreamed in that bed, good dreams and bad ones. He’s fallen ill and recovered in that bed. He’s grown more than a foot while spending nights sleeping there. He’s daydreamed and played on that bed, which has taken him to other planets and who knows where else through his imaginings.
So selling off the bed is more than just ridding the house of an article of unwanted furniture. It’s saying farewell to a fixture that, for the past 2,555 nights, kept my youngest child feeling safe and sound even through dark moments of loneliness when he woke up and realized his dad no longer slept under that particular roof with him.
These things slip through our fingers – a kid’s half life – gone in a second, I thought to myself. But what can a parent do?
He’s as anxious to grow up and live his life as I was….as I am. No fault in wanting that. And with a new bed will come new dreams and growth that will, in just a few years, make this boy a young man. A young man who’ll always be admired and loved.
-end-
The good side of this is many years from now you will still hold those memories as fresh as they happened yesterday.
Don’t sell the bed….